GOP looks for answers on polling

The campaign arm of the congressional GOP is moving to reboot its polling operation after a messy 2012 cycle, the first concrete remedy taken by the Republican side since candidates and outside groups were left stunned on Election Day by results that their internal data never came close to predicting.

The National Republican Congressional Committee is the first GOP entity to take specific steps to try to rectify the party’s widely acknowledged polling debacle. Republican strategists confirmed after the end of the 2012 race that a huge slice of their survey data was based on flawed assumptions, and failed to anticipate the diversity and scale of turnout on the Democratic side.

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The Republicans’ 17-seat House majority is their last bulwark against full Democratic control of the federal government, and senior party officials say they don’t intend to lose that firewall thanks to shoddy polling.

With that in mind, the NRCC has gathered its top pollsters for a series of meetings and conference calls in the first months of 2013, bringing together prominent commercial rivals for conversations about how to right an embattled political industry.

The cornerstone of their effort, officials say, is a large-scale NRCC project to model the electorate in the several dozen districts that will determine control of the House. The committee has formed a new Strategy Department tasked with projecting district-by-district population changes and mapping best- and worst-case turnout scenarios for campaigns to use in guiding their surveys.

The new division is organized under John Rogers, a former regional political director, and will work closely with the NRCC’s polling vendors in its modeling project.

The NRCC-organized talks between pollsters have also produced a set of standards and practices that campaigns will be urged to follow for 2014. Pollsters will be expected to have at least 30 percent of their samples made up of cell phone users, if not more – an attempt to capture more of the Democratic-leaning young voters who eluded GOP survey-gatherers last year.

In districts with significant Hispanic populations, party officials will urge campaigns to spring for Spanish-language call centers in order to survey less-assimilated Hispanic respondents who may not answer a poll in English.

The measures may be expensive, but the strategists mapping out the 2014 campaign say it’s absolute necessary to ensure candidates don’t find themselves effectively flying blind after Labor Day of 2014.

“We are modeling and analyzing districts like we never have before and we are working closely with pollsters to make sure our data and research is precise,” said Liesl Hickey, the executive director of the NRCC.

Participants in the NRCC’s polling discussions described them as collegial and candid – an unusual, Godfather-like setting in which representatives from various polling families meet in a neutral environment to address their shared interests.

The more optimistic Republicans say that if there’s a silver lining in the party’s 2012 setbacks, it’s that it has created a real openness among consultants – a famously territorial and ego-driven bunch – to work collaboratively at least for a little while.